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Why not use virtualization on the servers, then use DFRS to keep them all synced. Lastly use a seeded backup with a better backup tool to only focus on a changed bits? I could see Veeam as a candidate.

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I use DFS-R to replicate all files to a central location and run my backups against that central file server. It has nothing to do with virtualization. I don't know if KrisLeslie is thinking the same thing, or to actually use DFS-R to replicate the VMs. You can't do that, because you can't DFS-R replicate a running VM.

You can run DFS-R inside of VMs, which would be the normal thing to do as all file servers should be VMs these days. I don't backup the remote server at all.

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There are many ways to look at file servers....are they containing critical work files, user files or backup of user files (that reside on the users lappy) ?

Are the file servers on NAS storage, physical servers or VMs ?

Also what is the average increment backup size, the amount of files open by users daily and your WAN bandwidth ? Increment backup size can estimate the amount of changes made by users (if 50GB, then multiply by compression rate of like 3x.....so changes in "file size" could be like 150GB to 200GB)....but note that you may also need to factor in files are open but not changed (like pdf etc). That will determine if it is good to have a "centralised" file server.

Since we are talking about storage of 3TB, you can have the following setup

Obviously if you can centralized and get rid of remote servers that solves the problem and would be the way to go if you can make it work. If you do have to backup the remote servers then I wouldn't use anything that takes full backups. You want something that is incremental forever. Veeam and Asigra can do this and allow you to back up to a central site and/or offsite cloud. Just make sure you are getting offsite copies of backups that doesn't require manually moving media around - which can become quite the burden with multiple locations.